The Implications of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Sales between Moscow and Tel Aviv

Here's an international military manoeuvre to de-cipher: according to the Jerusalem Post, Israel is planning to expedite production of unmanned aerial vehicles for Russia.

There are two starting points for an analysis. In summer 2008, when Russia was at war with Georgia, Amos Gilad, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, visited Moscow and took away the guarantee that Russia would not sell the S300 defensive missile system to Iran. And only last week, Russia announced that it had decided to halt the sale of advanced MIG-31 fighter jets to Syria.

Contrary to a long-standing assumption, it appears that Moscow has not had significant leverage over Tehran’s nuclear enrichment. This may be partly because of Iran halted its nuclear weapons design and weaponization activities in fall 2003, as the latest CIA report reiterates.

Thus, Russia has to find other bargaining chips in the Middle Eastern game. And it need not worry --- even without a nuclear weapons programme, Iran has enough conventional weapons initiatives for either pretext or genuine fear, and there are other countries such as Syria who will have to be kept in their proper military place.

EA Exclusive: Israel Unravels Obama's "Grand Design" for the Middle East

On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu had a chat with President Obama. We wrote at the time, "The very public refusal of the Israeli Prime Minister [to accept separate Israeli and Palestinian states] is likely to damage, if not sink, far more than the American position on Israel-Palestine. The bigger casualty may be Obama’s strategy towards the Middle East and the Islamic world."

We wrote too soon. What happened after Netanyahu left the White House--- according to Israeli media, unnoticed by most US outlets --- is even more important.

President Obama, contrary to our earlier assessments, may have had a grand plan to offer on 4 June in Cairo. And Israeli officials, publicly and privately, have spent the last 96 hours ripping that plan apart.

The first revelation came on Wednesday in the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Arhonot. A report, summarised by the English-language Jerusalem Post, claimed that the Obama Administration was preparing the proposal of "a demilitarized Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital, within the next four years....[The] independent, democratic and contiguous Palestinian state would not have its own army and would be forbidden from making military agreements with other states, in order to provide for Israel's security." Palestinians would give up their claim of a "right of return" to land previously held in Israel, with Europe and the US arranging compensation for refugees.

The newspaper, citing Palestinian sources, claimed that the plan was developed in recent talks between President Obama and King Abdullah. There would also be wider talks with Syria and Lebanon, and an effect to get a general agreement between Israel and Arab States.

Some of Yediot Arhonot's information is shaky. There is an inconsistency between East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital and the paper's later assertion of Jerusalem as an international city, and Abdullah's meetings in Washington were to brief him as an emissary for the plan. Still the revelations, when matched up to the diplomacy of Obama officials and allies like Abdullah and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in recent weeks, make sense.

Most importantly, Israeli officials believe this is a possibility. That is why, on the plane back from Washington, Netanyahu advisors told reporters that Obama's two-state plan was "childish" and "juvenile". (I first read this news on Wednesday, again via Yediot Arhonot; it was later picked up by the Associated Press, although I saw no mention of it in US newspapers or television.) Far from contradicting those advisors, the Prime Minister --- speaking on Jerusalem Day, which commemorating the Israeli takeover of the city in the 1967 Six-Day War --- declared yesterday, "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours."

Netanyahu has made other, balancing manoeuvres. He held out the prospect of renewed discussions with Syria, although he pointedly added that there must be no preconditions, such as a Syrian demand for the return of the Golan Heights. Israeli forces destroyed an illegal settlement yesterday.

These, however, are only sidesteps as Israel re-stakes its position both against specific US demands and the general Obama plan. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed Obama's call for a halt to Israeli expansion, putting it in stronger terms, ""We want to see a stop to settlement construction - additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity - that is what the president has called for." The removal of one illegal settlement could not cover up the resounding silence of the Netanyahu Government to Clinton's demand.

More importantly, the Obama Administration appears to be stuck --- in the face of far-from-subtle Israeli opposition --- on how to re-shape the grand design for a Palestinian state and Arab-Israeli agreements. Having found a way to exclude Hamas from the "engagement", Obama has been unable to bring Netanyahu on board.

Which means --- with 13 days to the Cairo speech --- that Israel has sabotaged Plan A. Is there any prospect of a Plan B?

Shifting Alliances: The Israel-Turkey-Syria Triangle

Two weeks ago, Turkey and Syria held, for the first time in history, joint military drills. The exercises were a clear sign of the increasingly close ties between the two states as they co-operate on wider agendas.  At the same time, they raise the question: what happens to other relationship, notably the long-standing ties between Ankara and Tel Aviv?

When Turkey felt isolated by its neighbors in 1995, the first door it knocked on was Israel's. The Turks had one eye on recent manoeuvres by Greece: the Greco-Syrian military training agreement in 1995 followed a similar arrangement between Israel and Greece in December 1994. On the economic front, the volume of trade between Israel and Greece reached $350 million, double that of 1989. Meanwhile, Syria was causing problems with the border dispute over Hatay, arguments over water, and Hafez al Assad's support to the PKK, the Kurdish "terrorist" organization.

Turkey's nightmare was wider cooperation between Syria and Israel, meaning that Tel Aviv would be tied to long-standing rivals both in Damascus and in Athens. So Ankara countered with a full alignment with Israel. Military, economic and technological agreements were reached in 1996, and a trilateral operation in the Eastern Mediterranean by Israel, Turkey and the US was conducted in January 1998.

More than a decade later, it is Tel Aviv which is concerned about "isolation" as other countries establish alliances. Defense Minister Ehud Barak called the Turkish-Syrian exercise "a worrisome situation" and the Israeli press featured the issue after the head of the Turkish military, Ilker Basbug said Turkey was not interested in Israel's reaction. The Jerusalem Post tried to limit the exercise's significance, with the claim of Professor Efraim Inbar that he had spoken to Turkish army officers: "The Turkish military does not like Syria, and views it as a problematic state." The newspaper also highlighted tensions between the army and Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party.

The Israeli criticisms are evidence that the fallout from the rhetorical war between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israel's leaders has not dissipated. The revenge for Erdogan's attack on Israel at the Davos summit is the wearing down of his Justice and Development Party. Thus the hostility to the Turkish-Syrian exercises is in part a message to Turkey's military: keep your Prime Minister under control.

As for the regional politics, the Israeli response is another signal that  any peace will have to start with Israeli-Syrian talks rather than alignments beyond Tel Aviv. Yet the Israeli-Syrian discussions have been sidelined with the Netanyahu Government's focus on Iran, set against the US insistence on a two-state solution with Palestine.

So the Israeli media fills the political vacuum while trying to keep both Turkey and Syria off-balance. The question arises: is this also the aim of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, or are they also trying to figure out how to reconcile Israel's relationship with its immediate crises with its wider but now suspect "alliances" in the region?